Yeah, the amount of resistance towards automation at some larger companies is a total mindfuck.
My first ops job back in 2008 was at a large exchange's NOC where we shut down and clean the application environment every day. Every Friday, we would have to take a backup of the ~20 or so production databases - by hand, in an ancient CDE based UI with a . Right click -> menu -> submenu -> backup database. Very little room for error, and you weren't allowed to do it without somebody else watching you. Throughout the weekend, customers would then run tests against the production databases. Once testing was done, we'd restore the prod databases back to their original state to wipe out test data.
At one point, I asked my boss if it was alright if I automated it after showing him a POC and was rejected because, "We don't trust automation to do it accurately every single time." Mind boggling. In mild fairness, in the 15 or so years they were doing that, I don't think anyone did it wrong.. which is an enormous miracle in itself.
(That was a strange company. My boss was a JW who'd worked there for 30 years regularly tried to convert me and would spend four hours a day on spreadsheets for his church. We'd also manually kick off stock split processing from a ~10" CRT monitor from the early nineties.)
My first ops job back in 2008 was at a large exchange's NOC where we shut down and clean the application environment every day. Every Friday, we would have to take a backup of the ~20 or so production databases - by hand, in an ancient CDE based UI with a . Right click -> menu -> submenu -> backup database. Very little room for error, and you weren't allowed to do it without somebody else watching you. Throughout the weekend, customers would then run tests against the production databases. Once testing was done, we'd restore the prod databases back to their original state to wipe out test data.
At one point, I asked my boss if it was alright if I automated it after showing him a POC and was rejected because, "We don't trust automation to do it accurately every single time." Mind boggling. In mild fairness, in the 15 or so years they were doing that, I don't think anyone did it wrong.. which is an enormous miracle in itself.
(That was a strange company. My boss was a JW who'd worked there for 30 years regularly tried to convert me and would spend four hours a day on spreadsheets for his church. We'd also manually kick off stock split processing from a ~10" CRT monitor from the early nineties.)